PARSORT(1) parallel PARSORT(1)

# [NAME](#NAME)

parsort - Sort (big files) in parallel

# [SYNOPSIS](#SYNOPSIS)

**parsort** *options for sort*

# [DESCRIPTION](#DESCRIPTION)

**parsort** uses GNU **sort** to sort in parallel. It works just like **sort** but faster on inputs with more than 1 M lines, if you have a multicore machine.

Hopefully these ideas will make it into GNU **sort** in the future.

# [OPTIONS](#OPTIONS)

Same as **sort**. Except:

[**--parallel=N**](#parallel=)

Change the number of sorts run concurrently to *N*. *N* will be increased to number of files if **parsort** is given more than *N* files.

# [EXAMPLE](#EXAMPLE)

Sort files:

```
  parsort *.txt > sorted.txt
```

Sort stdin (standard input) numerically:

```
  cat numbers | parsort -n > sorted.txt
```

# [PERFORMANCE](#PERFORMANCE)

**parsort** is faster on files than on stdin (standard input), because different parts of a file can be read in parallel.

On a 48 core machine you should see a speedup of 3x over **sort**.

# [AUTHOR](#AUTHOR)

Copyright (C) 2020-2026 Ole Tange, http://ole.tange.dk and Free Software Foundation, Inc.

# [LICENSE](#LICENSE)

Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or at your option any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

# [DEPENDENCIES](#DEPENDENCIES)

**parsort** uses **sort**, **bash**, and **parallel**.

# [SEE ALSO](#SEE_ALSO)

**sort**

2026-10-29 20261022

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Document: parsort(1) from parallel 20261022-r0 (Chainguard OS)
Source: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/parallel.git